A/N: Just some light romance to take my mind off my current writer's frustration with my other works. Hope you enjoy :)

Disclaimer: I don't own Bleach and I am making no money with those stories.

*

The First Evening

"'Ka-ku's got a girl-friend! 'Ka-ku's got a girl-friend!"

"Yachiru, shut it! And Yumichika, stop snickering, you're only encouraging her!"

Isane stared apprehensively at the scene in front of her; maybe it had not been such a good idea to just pop up unannounced like that after all... But, well, she had a car and she knew Ikkaku did not, so she had thought it would be more considerate for her to simply drive the ten minutes it took her to get there, than to call him and arrange some kind of meeting downtown, which would have required him to walk and take a bus and... No, really, it had seemed obvious that she should just hop into her car and drop his notebook at his place, especially since after all she owed him a favour for lending her his notes in the first place.

But now, as she stared at and listened to this tiny hyperactive little girl loudly proclaiming to the entire world that Isane was her brother's girlfriend - which she most certainly was not -, she figured she might have done better indeed to call Ikkaku, or to simply try to find him on the campus the next day...

A low, tired growl of a voice rose from the depths of the sofa:

"Yachiru, shut it, you're embarrassing them."

The little girl immediately quieted down, even though she still had a huge grin on her face.

"Yes, Kenny!"

Standing in the middle of the room and looking very embarrassed indeed, Ikkaku was scowling and furiously rubbing his bald head; Isane noticed with a shy amusement that he was going out of his way to avoid looking at her. Maybe, she wondered, this had something to do with the cooking apron he was wearing? She remembered him mentioning that his mother had died several years earlier; apparently, he had taken over the kitchen duties... With a blush and a smile, she extended her arm and handed his notebook over to him.

"Here, I just wanted to give this back to you. And to thank you so much for lending it to me, I really appreciate it."

He shrugged and grunted:

"Bah, that's nothing. Did... Did you understand everything? It can be a bit, er, cryptic sometimes..."

She stifled a laugh.

"Yes, I noticed. I think I got most of it, though. Maybe a couple of places I'm not sure what you meant, but I'll figure it out eventually, I'm sure."

He pointed with his thumb over his shoulder.

"Wanna come with me to the kitchen? I gotta finish cooking dinner, you can ask me while I work."

She hesitated; surely it would not be appropriate...? But, well, girlfriend or not, she would not mind staying around a bit longer... She smiled:

"Sure."

*

The inquiry over school matters soon turned into a personal discussion, as it often did when they worked together.

"So, how come you missed class anyway?"

Isane scowled: "My father."

Ikkaku looked up from where he was peeling carrots, with a clearly surprised expression on his face. She explained:

"The jerk figured that Kiyone and Hanatarou could take impromptu holidays in the middle of the trimester. He wouldn't bring them back from their week-end. Mom was taken up at the hospital, so I had to go and get them."

She gritted her teeth in annoyance as she briefly remembered the highly unpleasant meeting which had followed; why oh why did their father have to be so irresponsible sometimes? She sighed again:

"Oh well, at least I missed only two lectures. I'd have been very pissed if it had been practicals."

Ikkaku grunted: "Divorce is a pain in the ass, huh?"

She shrugged, and replied a bit timidly:

"Sometimes yes, but at least we're lucky, we've still got both our parents."

"... Ha."

There was an awkward pause after that, which was promptly shattered by the noisy arrival of the little girl, who almost seemed to bounce as she asked loudly:

"'Kaku! Can I recite my poem to you?"

Ikkaku groaned: "Can't you see I'm busy here, Yachiru? Go ask Kenny."

The girl pouted: "He's sleeping."

Ikkaku rolled his eyes; Isane spoke up:

"I can do it, if you want."

She laughed when both brother and sister looked at her askance.

"I do it for my little brother all the time."

With a glance at Ikkaku, who simply shrugged, Yachiru laid her notebook on the table in front of Isane, cleared her throat and began reciting her poem in the same flat, monotonous voice Hanatarou always used in those circumstances. Isane smiled; she knew this poem, she had had to learn it as well when she was younger. The little girl struggled through a couple of places, but in the end Isane was happy to give her back her notebook with a smile and a praise:

"Almost perfect! Well done."

Yachiru beamed at her and Isane felt like a ray of sun had touched her heart. The girl was adorable, even in all her hyperactivity. Her big, warm brown eyes were sparkling with enthusiasm, and her blonde and pink pigtails set high on her head almost seemed to be crackling with electricity. She loved pink, that much was obvious: she was wearing it all over, from her pink bunny slippers to her blue-jeans with pink trimmings, to her white t-shirt with a pink pony on it, to her pink, fuzzy elastic bands in her blonde hair streaked with pink highlights. Funnily enough, she somehow reminded Isane of Kiyone, even though Kiyone absolutely hated pink - it must be the sheer amount of raw energy that she was emitting...

She also apparently shared Kiyone's absolutely lack of manners, and Isane stuttered in surprise when Yachiru asked out of the blue:

"Are you staying for dinner? Pleeease?"

"I.. I can't!"

"Sure you can!" The girl turned to Ikkaku. "Right, 'Kaku? She can stay for dinner, can't she?"

Ikkaku blinked and looked at Isane and Yachiru in turn, and Isane realised that there was a big brother who did not know how to say no to his baby sister. She forced herself not to smile as he grumbled:

"Yeah, sure, whatever, if she wants to stay..."

Yachiru looked back at Isane with a hopeful expression her face, and Isane knew she had already lost the battle - especially since after all, she was not exactly anxious to go back to her lonely flat downtown...

*

As she had expected, Yachiru dominated the conversation over dinner. At first her attention was devoted to Isane, but after learning that Isane was studying to become a microbiologist, and that her hobbies included nothing more interesting that practicing her piano and playing basketball, she seemed to decide that her brother's "girlfriend" was a rather boring person and turned to recounting her own highly exciting life - which seemed to suit everyone else just fine.

At the head of the small table, sat "Kenny" - Kenpachi, as Ikkaku had introduced him -, a huge and taciturn man with a heavily lined face and a long mane of black hair streaked with gray and tied in a low ponytail; he looked at least ten years older than Isane suspected him to really be. She knew that he was a factory worker who constantly did overtime to earn enough money to provide for his three children, and she could see the affection and respect his sons and daughter had for him in the way he never had to repeat a request or an order. Even Yachiru never protested when he told her to change topic or to stop bothering Isane with her insane questions.

Now that she had met Kenpachi, Isane understood Ikkaku a lot better. He was definitely his father's son: same muscular physical build, same gruff and hard-working personality, same scowling face and growling voice that warned people not to mess with them... But also same devotion to their family, and same fierce caring hidden deep under layers of apparent aloofness and indifference. Those were strong men, who fought their way through whatever hardships life threw at them.

Glancing discreetly across the table, Isane could not help but wonder at the difference between those two and the third man of the family. The quiet teenager was as silent as his father and older brother, but that was where the similarities ended. Yumichika, as he had introduced himself to Isane in his soft tenor voice, was as tiny as the other two were tall and strong, as thin as they were muscular, and quite frankly as pretty as they were rugged, with his big, sad eyes, his carefully-maintained bobbed black hair with two thin colourful streaks - one yellow, one red - on the right side of his face, and his tight, trendy clothes. He seemed to come from a completely different mold from the rest of the family, and Isane could not help but wonder what his mother had looked like - surely Yumichika must be taking after her...

All in all, this was a very nice family, and even if their small apartment in the social housing suburbs looked nothing like her spacious downtown flat, her mother's large mansion in the uppity part of town, or her father's villa on the golden coast, it felt almost as much home to her, even after only a couple of hours, as any one of those places. A relaxed feeling of implicit acceptance permeated the air, and even through all the taunting and mock rough-housing that the siblings put each other through, it was clear as day that they deeply enjoyed the time spent in each other's company.

Right now, the topic of conversation, under Yachiru's ever-dominating guidance, had gone back to Ikkaku's (nonexistant) romantic life, and the bald young man was groaning as he chomped through an apple:

"Why don't you bother Yumichika about this, for once? Why don't you ask him about his girlfriends?"

The teenager huffed and rolled his eyes:

"Like I have time for that!"

"And what? You think I do?? I'm in college, remember, I've got tons of homework too. And if I get a job -"

"You ain't getting a job."

Isane shivered under the sudden tension that had settled around the table at Kenpachi's slow words. All three siblings had instantly fallen silent; Yachiru and Yumichika were carefully contemplating their own apples, while Ikkaku was scowling as he tried to stare his father down. He opened his mouth as though to say something, but he closed it again with a glance towards Isane, who guessed that he did not want to restart an old family feud in front of a stranger. For the second time tonight, she wished she had not come - or not stayed, at least...

She jumped when Ikkaku abruptly stood up and began gathering the dirty dishes. With slightly trembling hands, she eagerly tried to help, ending up carrying the stack of plates to the kitchen on Ikkaku's heels. As he started to run the hot water, she reclaimed her seat at the small table in the corner. She was not sure what to do: should she offer to do the dishes as thanks for the dinner, or would this insult Ikkaku? She was a guest after all, and guests were not supposed to do chores... right?

A couple of minutes after starting to scrub the dirty plates, Ikkaku let out a long sigh, and grunted:

"Sorry about that."

Isane smiled in relief. "That's okay... Touchy topic, I gather?"

He shrugged: "He says my studies will suffer if I get a job. Says I need to focus only on them for now. Get a good degree, and then a good job."

Isane kept quiet for a minute; she rather agreed with Kenpachi, but she also understood Ikkaku's desire to help his family out. Surely, with only one factory worker's salary to provide for three children, including a college student, finances were bound to be tight.

Eventually, she suggested timidly:

"Maybe you could get a scolarship or something?"

Ikkaku shrugged again: "Already have one. Wouldn't be in college at all without it."

He sighed again, and glanced at the half-closed door before continuing in a hushed voice:

"It's not for me. It's for Yumichika. He's studying sciences right now, but he's really an artist. Did you see Yachiru's clothes? All the frilly stuff on her jeans, and the poney on her shirt? And the way her hair is done?"

Isane nodded, and Ikkaku continued.

"Well, that's Yumichika's doing. Saw his clothes? He did them himself. He salvages old clothes from people left and right and he cuts them up and makes new stuff with them. He spends almost all his free time at school, on one of the theater club's sewing machines, or messing around in the arts department. When he's lucky and there's a free computer in the lab, he even gets down to drawing some of those computer imaging thingies. Anything that's got to do with graphic arts and clothes, he's into it."

Ikkaku scowled, dried his hands on a towel, and went to close the door for good, before returning to his washing.

"Last year, he entered that big competition, and he came out third for the entire country. That entitled him to a full scholarship to attend that school in the capital that he's been dreaming of for the last five years. Best thing in the whole land, apparently."

Ikkaku's voice turned bitter.

"Only problem is, full scholarship ain't really full scholarship apparently. We still had to dish out a nice amount of money, and we couldn't do it. Ken tried to get another credit at the bank, but they wouldn't hear of it. And he wouldn't hear of me taking one and working to pay it off. So... So Yumichika didn't go. He should be there right now, but he ain't. He's studying Sciences instead, like a good little boy, and maybe he'll become a doctor or something..."

Isane figured that this was not a good time to mention that her own mother was a doctor; this was not the point after all. The point was money - something her family had plenty of, and that she had never really thought about until now. She had known for a very long time that she was priviledged, that most other people had it harder than she did, but it was not often that she was directly confronted with poverty and its life-long effects. She thought back to the two children in the living-room, Yachiru and her cute clothes, Yumichika and his fashionable ones: the boy had done all of this? He had talent indeed. How unfair that he should not be able to fulfill his dreams just because of something as trivial as money!

A knock on the door made them both jump. Yachiru's high voice piped up:

"Hey, can I come in?"

Isane rushed to open the door, and looked down at the beaming little girl, who asked without preambles:

"I like you. When are you coming back?"

Isane grinned as she clearly heard Ikkaku spluttering behind her.

* End of chapter one *